AMD’s Ryzen 3000 processors seem to have pleased most enthusiasts, however, overclockers aren’t that impressed by the chips’ abilities, mainly because AMD has already pushed the Zen 2 CPUs to the highest possible frequencies (under stock conditions). According to AMD’s senior technical marketing manager, Robert Hallock, you’re better off overclocking the memory and the Infinity Fabric instead of the processor.

The other goal of our engineering effort is to absolutely maximize the performance of the product out of the box. By designing algorithms that extract the maximum silicon performance automatically (e.g. Precision Boost 2) without asking the user to tinker or risk their warranty. So, no, you’re not going to see a whole lot of manual OC headroom. That’s just performance an average person–who doesn’t know how to OC–can’t access. Why would we do that? It is not our intent to leave anything on the table.

Rober Hallock on Reddit

This isn’t surprising considering that the lower-end Ryzen 3000 parts come with a TDP of just 65W. The Ryzen 7 3700X and the 3800X have the same specifications, and yet the latter has a rated power draw of 105W, so you can expect a much better overclocking experience. The same goes for the Ryzen 9, we’ll have an overclocking guide up on the same soon.

I believe that isn’t a bad thing at all. AMD has essentially overclocked the Zen 2 parts out of the box, saving you the hassle and giving the average consumer the extra performance you’d get after the painstaking process for free.

However, that doesn’t mean that the higher-end Ryzen chips don’t overclock at all. Many users have already started posting benchmarks of the Ryzen 9 hitting 5GHz+ on all cores. Granted, that was using LN2 but that’s what most of the hardcore enthusiasts will be using after all.

I love computer hardware and RPGs, and those two things are what drove me to start TechQuila. Other than that most of my time goes into reading psychology, writing (and reading) dark poetry and wondering about the vast undiscovered expanses of our universe.